how we use words

Posted on by Patricia Oxley

http://bigthink.com/experts/joscha-bach

 

joscha bach   makes a very interesting distinction between knowing something by reference and knowing something by content.

 

Pat: This is a very important comment on how we use language.  and is so important for the general theme of how we in society make our world view.  I need to consider this further because maybe it means that we talk with words that are at one remove from reality.  that the whole fabric of our discourse is in a world of its own – this chimes with saussure that words only have meanings in relation to other words

and then with barthes that because of this quality of word usage, language use is wide open to be colonised with ideology

this seems to be an extremely important

https://www.acast.com/intelligencesquared/aneveningwithslavoj-i-ek

Posted on by Patricia Oxley

Zizek talking about education and what he sees as deterioration of modern educationopen space of apparently useless  – it has gone past the place on the recording and i cannot pause it but it is important  and it

I think it is about the aimlessness of art

chimes with schillers spielraum

 

 

 

An Evening with Slavoj Žižek Radical philosopher, polymath, film star, cult icon, and author of over 30 books, Slavoj Žižek is one of the most controversial and leading contemporary public intellectuals, simultaneously acclaimed as the ‘Elvis of cultural theory’ and denounced as ‘the most dangerous philosopher in the West’. In this special lecture for Intelligence Squared from July 2011, Žižek argues that global capitalism is fast approaching its terminal crisis and that our collective responses to economic Armageddon correspond to the five stages of grief – ideological denial, explosions of anger, attempts at bargaining, followed by depression and finally acceptance of change. Referencing everything from Kafka, the “Hollywood Marxism” of Avatar, the Arab Spring and WikiLeaks, he presents a roadmap for finding a way beyond the madness.

 

things that you can’t declare

Posted on by Patricia Oxley

this notion seems important to me in identifying those things we put in a painting or make visible thro making a piece of art.

the words are those of

David Linden, PhD – Neurobiologist, Author of The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning and Gambling Feel So Good, and professor at Johns Hopkins.

 

he is talking about memory in a podcast episode 112 of smart people podcast.  he describes memory:he says memory is not a unitary system: you have a memory system for facts and a whole other system for ‘things that you can’t declare – e.g. associations /motor learning

these are stored in different ways:

facts and events are stored as in the hippocampus then exported to the neocortex

other things are eventually stored in the same area of the brain that were used when originally experiencing it  (check this!!)

this seems to me to be an important insight into what we do when we make art and what we do when we view art

needs like so so much else to be explored in

 

 

 

 

From Art, censorship and morality – Mathew Kieran

Posted on by Patricia Oxley

Secondly the role of public art institutions is to give place to good and great art. And the point of good and great art is to get us to engage with not just the world but finding out about ourselves. One of the primary ways in which you do that is by coming up against and thinking about ways of looking at the world, ways of responding to the world, ways of thinking about the world which you disagree with. Through doing so you will suddenly find that things that you had assumed previously you have now changed your mind about. If you only speak to, or only ever look at, works which conform to your own world view, you’re going to have a very narrow world view.

David Edmonds: This is Ethics Bites, with me David Edmonds. Nigel Warburton: And me Nigel Warburton. David: Ethics Bites is a series of interviews on applied ethics, produced in association with The Open University. Nigel: For more information about Ethics Bites, and about the Open University, go to Open2.net.